Upper lower split: the complete 4 day workout plan

What is an upper lower split?

An upper lower split divides your training into two kinds of session. Upper days cover everything above the waist: chest, back, shoulders, biceps and triceps. Lower days cover the legs and hips: quads, hamstrings, glutes and calves, often with some core work. You alternate the two, and in the standard four day version you do each one twice a week.

That gives the split its main strength: every muscle is trained twice a week, which is the frequency most evidence-based coaches recommend, while each session only has to cover half the body. A full body session has room for one exercise per muscle. An upper or lower session has room for three or four, so you can train each muscle from more than one angle without spending two hours in the gym.

The 4 day upper lower split workout plan

Most upper lower plans repeat the same upper and the same lower session twice. This one uses four different days. The A days are heavy: the main barbell lifts for 5 to 8 reps with long rests, where strength is built. The B days are for volume: dumbbells, machines and cables for 8 to 20 reps with shorter rests, where most of the extra muscle-building sets live. You get practice on the big lifts and enough variety that no joint does the same thing four times a week.

Lower A leads with the squat and Lower B with the hip thrust, so the heaviest squatting happens once a week and Lower B is easier on the lower back. Upper A opens with the bench press and the barbell row at low reps; Upper B moves to an incline, pull-ups and more arm work. Pull-ups on Upper B can be swapped for the lat pulldown until you can do six clean reps.

Weekly sets per muscle

Every major muscle lands between 9 and 13 hard sets a week, which is a solid middle-of-the-road dose for lifters past their first few months. Arms and shoulders look low on paper but get plenty of indirect work from the compounds. If they lag, add one set to each arm exercise on the B days before adding anything else.

Upper lower split schedule: 3, 4 and 5 days

The four day layout is the one people mean by upper lower split, but the same sessions bend to other weeks. Pick the row that matches the days you can train without fail.

3 day upper lower split

With three days, keep cycling the four sessions in order: Upper A, Lower A, Upper B one week, then Lower B, Upper A, Lower A the next. Each muscle gets three sessions every two weeks instead of four. It is a good fit for beginners and for busy months, and you lose less than you might think: the same total sets per session still count.

5 day upper lower split

With five days, run the four day plan and add a short Saturday session for the muscles the split trains least: 3 sets each of lateral raises, face pulls, an incline curl, a hammer curl and a triceps extension. That lifts side shoulders, rear shoulders and arms toward 10 sets a week without making the main sessions longer. If you would rather train every muscle on all five days in rotation, the 5 day hybrid in the workout split guide pairs upper lower with push pull legs.

How to progress on an upper lower split

Use double progression. Pick a weight you can lift for the bottom of the rep range with one to three reps left in the tank, which is RPE 7 to 9 on the effort scale. Keep that weight until you hit the top of the range on every set, then add the smallest jump and build the reps back up.

Warm up with two or three lighter sets before the first lift of each day; the warm-up calculator gives the exact weights and the plate calculator loads the bar. If you want to start from a percentage of your max, the one rep max calculator estimates it from any recent set.

Rest matters more than it looks. In trained men doing the same total-body program, resting 3 minutes between sets instead of 1 minute led to bigger gains in squat and bench press strength and more growth in the thighs over 8 weeks (Schoenfeld et al., 2016). That is why the heavy lifts in this plan get 2 to 3 minutes. Do not cut rests short to save time; cut an isolation exercise instead.

Every five to eight weeks, or whenever two or more lifts stall for two weeks running, take a lighter week: same exercises, half the sets, a couple of reps further from failure. Then continue from your last good numbers.

Why heavy and light days?

Mixing a heavy and a lighter version of each day is called daily undulating periodization. It is not magic for muscle growth: a meta-analysis of 13 studies found that undulating and the more traditional linear periodization produced practically identical hypertrophy (effect size −0.02) (Grgic et al., 2017).

The reason to use it here is practical. Heavy sets of 5 build strength on the barbell lifts and are hard on joints and the nervous system; doing them four times a week wears most people down. Lighter sets of 10 to 15 on dumbbells and machines add muscle-building volume without that cost. Two heavy days and two lighter ones give you both, and the change of pace keeps the week from feeling like the same session four times.

Is an upper lower split good? What the research says

Yes, but not because it is a uniquely superior split. A 2024 meta-analysis of 14 studies and 392 people compared split routines with full body routines and found similar gains in bench press and leg strength, and similar growth in the arms, the thighs and lean body mass, as long as total volume was the same. The authors concluded that people can pick a routine on personal preference (Ramos-Campo et al., 2024).

Frequency follows the same pattern. A meta-analysis of 25 studies found no meaningful difference in muscle growth between training a muscle once or several times a week when weekly sets were matched; when they were not matched, higher frequencies came out modestly ahead, mainly because they made it easier to do more sets (Schoenfeld et al., 2019). Twice a week, which upper lower gives you by default, is the easy way to fit 10 or more sets per muscle into reasonable sessions.

One trial in 21 trained men compared a total body program with a split routine over 10 weeks. Both groups got stronger and bigger. The total body group improved more on an isokinetic bench press test, while the split group grew the outer thigh (vastus lateralis) more (Bartolomei et al., 2021). It is a small study, and the honest reading is the same as the meta-analysis: both work, and the differences are small.

Pros and cons

• Pro: two sessions per muscle with only four gym days, and a full rest day midweek.
• Pro: shorter, focused sessions. About an hour, with room for three or four exercises per area.
• Pro: forgiving. Miss a day and you simply do the next session in line.
• Con: lower days are hard. Squats, Romanian deadlifts and leg press in one session is a lot; that is why this plan splits the hardest leg work across two days.
• Con: upper days get long if you chase lots of arm and shoulder work. Use the fifth day for that instead.

Who should run an upper lower split?

Lifters with four days a week and at least a few months of training behind them. It is the most common next step after a beginner full body program, because it doubles the room for exercises without taking muscles below two sessions a week.

Beginners can run it too. Start with the 3 day schedule, cut every exercise to 2 or 3 sets, and spend the first month learning the lifts with weights that feel easy. If you have never trained before, a three day full body plan from the workout split guide is simpler to start with; switch to upper lower when sessions start to run long.

Women can run the plan as written. If glutes are the priority, add one set to the hip thrust and the Bulgarian split squat on Lower B and a set of hip thrusts at the end of Lower A. If you train at home with dumbbells, swap the barbell lifts for their dumbbell versions (goblet squat, dumbbell bench press, dumbbell Romanian deadlift) and keep the same sets and reps.

Common upper lower split mistakes